EDITORS: Auer, Peter; Wei, Li TITLE: Handbook of Multilingualism and Multilingual Communication SERIES: Handbooks of Applied Linguistics [HAL] 5 YEAR: 2007 PUBLISHER: Mouton de Gruyter
Jean-Jacques Weber, Departments of English and Education, University of Luxembourg
SUMMARY In the Introduction to this new volume in the prestigious Handbooks of Applied Linguistics series, the editors emphasize that multilingualism is not a problem but is sometimes seen as a problem due to the continuing dominance of ideologies of monolingualism and homogeneism in many spheres of public life:
If, then, this handbook is concerned with problems that arise through and surrounding multilingualism, it should be clear that these problems are not ''natural'' problems which are inherent to multilingualism itself; rather, they arise out of a certain context in which this multilingualism is seen as a problem (3).
They conclude that multilingualism is in fact part of the solution to many social problems because of its ''bridge-building potential – bridges between different groups within the nation, bridges with groups beyond the artificial boundaries of a nation, and bridges for cross-fertilization between cultures'' (12). _The Handbook of Multilingualism and Multilingual Communication_ contributes to this agenda not only by helping with the social rehabilitation of multilingualism but also by making available in a compact form the latest research results in the study of multilingualism. The Handbook is divided into four sections, ''Becoming Bilingual'', ''Staying Bilingual'', ''Acting Multilingual'' and ''Living in a Multilingual Society.''
The first three chapters explore the topic of ''bringing up children bi- or multilingually'' from a psychological perspective (Johanne Paradis' ''Early bilingual and multilingual acquisition''), an interactional perspective (Elizabeth Lanza's ''Multilingualism and the family'') and a Language Socialization perspective (Patricia Baquedano-López and Shlomy Kattan's ''Growing up in a multilingual community: Insights from language socialization''). I will come back to Paradis' chapter in the Evaluation section below, so I focus here on the other two chapters. Lanza studies the influence of the family on early bilingual acquisition and identifies a number of approaches which help to map out the most important factors involved in fostering family bilingualism: she particularly singles out language ideological approaches – because the attitudes and beliefs of parents and the society can play a role in bilingual acquisition – and interactional analyses of parent-child conversations. In her interesting discussion of the latter framework, she shows how parents' discourse strategies can (consciously or unconsciously) socialize children into language separation or code-switching.
Baquedano-López and Kattan explore how Language Socialization understands the processes of becoming multilingual (they use capital letters because they refer to the field of study initiated by such scholars as Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin). Research in this area is longitudinal, ethnographic, descriptive and analytic, and provides a socioculturally situated view of these processes. Just like Lanza, the authors highlight the concept of language ideologies which, they argue, ''has been most central in understanding language choice and language shift as linked to notions of ethnicity and ... to notions of identity'' (87).
The last chapters in this section are Jean-Marc Dewaele's ''Becoming bi- or multi-lingual later in life'' and Colin Baker's ''Becoming bilingual through bilingual education.'' Dewaele reviews both quantitative and qualitative research in the field and calls for interdisciplinary work that combines these methodologies: ''Only a concerted interdisciplinary effort will allow a more global and profound understanding of the feelings and behaviour of adult bilinguals'' (123). He shows how people's attitudes and feelings about their languages influence their language behaviour and help to explain changes in their linguistic repertoires. What he seems to be talking about here is language ideologies – which are defined as ''beliefs, or feelings, about languages as used in their social worlds'' in Kroskrity (2004: 498) and whose importance was stressed in the two previous chapters, though Dewaele himself does not use this terminology. It may be that the language ideological and Language Socialization approaches are just the ones that could lead to the more ''global and profound understanding'' that he is calling for.
Baker provides a useful typology of bilingual education and discusses the effectiveness of the different models. The 'strong' version of bilingual education (where subject content is taught through two languages) is consistently presented as the most positive model, though of course the diversity and heterogeneity of children from a wide range of linguistic backgrounds in today's urban neighbourhoods and global cities makes the 'right' choice of bilingual education an increasingly challenging - though not impossible - task (see also Horner and Weber 2008).
Section 2 (''Staying Bilingual'') opens with two chapters which focus on this question of educational provision for bilingual children with a migration background: ''Bilingual children in monolingual schools'' by J. Normann Jørgensen and Pia Quist, and ''From minority programmes to multilingual education'' by Guus Extra. Jørgensen and Quist's chapter is divided into two parts: in the first, they report on the results of the Køge Project, a longitudinal study of the linguistic development of Turkish-Danish students in monolingual Danish schools. Interestingly, they show how different patterns of language use correlate with differences between boys' and girls' identity work. In the second part, they discuss the Norwegian (and other European) debates about linguistic minority children's schooling and the part played in these debates by language ideologies such as the one nation – one language ideology. As for Extra, he describes the positive contributions of such educational schemes as ''muttersprachlicher Unterricht'' (mother-tongue education) in North Rhine-Westphalia and the LOTE (Languages Other Than English) programme in the Australian State of Victoria. He closes his chapter with some critical comments on the European elite discourses of trilingualism, which are concerned with national and regional minority languages but not immigrant minority languages.
In ''From biliteracy to pluriliteracies'', Ofelia García, Lesley Bartlett and JoAnne Kleifgen develop an eclectic framework for the analysis of plurilingual and multimodal literacy practices within their sociocultural contexts, and call for new pedagogies to break through the ideologies of strict language compartmentalization that still prevail in many educational institutions. Monika Rothweiler's ''Multilingualism and Specific Language Impairment (SLI)'' shows that there is no connection between multilingualism and SLI (SLI has congenital causes and is not an acquired disease), and warns that multilingual children may be falsely diagnosed as suffering from SLI due to inappropriate uses of monolingual-based testing procedures. Manfred Pienemann and Jörg-U. Keßler (''Measuring bilingualism'') point to problems in the measurement of individual bilingualism and advocate a cross-linguistic comparative measurement technique based on Pienemann's Processability Theory.
Most of the chapters in Section 3 ''Acting Multilingual'' deal with various aspects of code-switching. Joseph Gafaranga, in his ''Code-switching as a conversational strategy'', provides an overview of research from the diglossia model via identity-related explanations to organizational accounts. Garafanga himself adds a view of code-switching as an aspect of the overall (and not just local) organization of bilingual conversation. He concludes that all these approaches are complementary and are needed to capture the multi-facetedness of language alternation phenomena. Pieter Muysken (''Mixed codes'') discusses the social conditions under which mixed codes emerge as well as the psycholinguistic processes by which they emerge.
Benjamin Bailey's ''Multilingual forms of talk and identity work'' is a refreshingly different chapter as it does not just provide an overview of previous research but mostly presents the author's own ideas and examples. Bailey is interested in the identity-related function of code-switching and presents detailed analyses of bilingual talk that illustrate how identity work is done through metaphorical switches. He also discusses the monolingual ideology that still informs some academic work on multilingualism and argues that multilingualism needs to be studied as a dimension of social and political practice. In ''Crossing - negotiating social boundaries'', Quist and Jørgensen examine one particular case of code-switching, namely language crossing. They distinguish between mocking and non-mocking uses of crossing as well as outgroup and ingroup mocking, and claim that stylisation is often based on media stereotypes. They provide a stimulating analysis of two examples of crossing by Danish students, showing that the way in which the crossing is interpreted depends on the speaker's position in the local peer network.
The last three chapters in this section look at various aspects of multilingualism in the workplace. In a somewhat slight piece, Dennis Day and Johannes Wagner (''Bilingual professionals'') present some comments on language policy in (e.g.) Danish sports clubs and linguistic interaction – especially lingua franca interaction – in multinational companies. Celia Roberts' ''Multilingualism in the workplace'' is a more thorough and comprehensive review of research in the field which also includes a discussion of sociopolitical issues of power, discrimination and exclusion. Finally, David C.S. Li, in ''Multilingualism and commerce'', mentions a rather eclectic collection of aspects illustrating how the global economy impacts upon both societal and individual multilingualism.
Section 4, ''Living in a Multilingual Society'', is introduced by John Edwards' ''Societal multilingualism: reality, recognition and response''. His discussion of language legislation and language rights, linguistic ecology and the classification of language-contact situations is extended in the two following chapters, ''Multilingualism of autochthonous minorities'' by Penelope Gardner-Chloros and ''Multilingualism of new minorities (in migratory contexts)'' by Peter Martin. These two chapters complement each other in the sense that the former looks at ''old'' or autochthonous minority languages such as Alsatian in France (including the sensitive issue of the relation between Alsatian and German), and the latter investigates ''new'' or immigrant minority languages, especially in the UK. At the same time, the authors are careful to point out that the distinction between the two is not clear-cut but rather a continuum.
The last two chapters of the Handbook follow Bailey's call for a discussion of the politics of multilingualism. In ''Multilingualism in ex-colonial countries,'' Christopher Stroud explores the dynamics of multilingualism in two ex-colonial multilingual states, Singapore and Mozambique, while Monica Heller, in ''Multilingualism and transnationalism'', examines the tensions and paradoxes that traverse transnational multilingualism. She ends her chapter (and the volume) with a spirited call for a new ''multi-sited sociolinguistics of transnational multilingualism'' (547).
EVALUATION At the beginning of this review, I mentioned that the editors in their Introduction argue that multilingualism is frequently seen as a problem due to the continuing dominance of essentialist assumptions and ideologies. What is rather disturbing is that traces of such assumptions can be found in the Handbook itself. Thus, in chapter 1, the ''multilingualism as a problem'' ideology raises its ugly head when Paradis keeps debating the question whether bilinguals ''lag behind'' monolinguals in their acquisition rates in one or both their languages (17). ''Lag behind'' is used six times in this context, along with related expressions such as ''score below'' (repeated three times in the chapter), so that the reader gets the impression of a ''first past the post'' underlying assumption: phonological or lexical or morphosyntactic acquisition is presented as if it were a race where the only thing that matters is coming first. Monolingual development is looked upon as the norm, and what seems to be forgotten is that bilinguals are in the process of acquiring two linguistic varieties, so they can hardly be seen as ''lagging behind'' or indeed as taking part in the same ''race'' as monolinguals. In the very last sentence of her chapter Paradis displays a critical awareness of these assumptions, but the chapter would have been so much better if it had been informed as a whole by such an awareness.
Paradis' chapter is not the only one in which such assumptions and ideologies are relied upon, though they are rejected in other chapters of the Handbook. Let me give two examples: while Edwards (451) problematizes the concept of mother-tongue, Extra relies on it in his discussion of ''mother-tongue education'' in Germany. He seems to endorse the mother-tongue ideology that (migrant) children have one and only one mother-tongue, whereas the actual language situation of these children is frequently far more complex (see chapter 14 of the Handbook, where Quist and Jørgensen warn that ''the school as an institution often categorizes speakers according to linguistic or ethnic origin, ignoring among other things the fact that many bilinguals in urban, western communities grow up in mixed families with different linguistic and ethnic backgrounds'' (377); cf. also Weber (forthcoming)).
Finally, Bailey insists on the need to look upon concepts such as language and multilingualism as socially constructed, just like race and ethnicity. Other contributors, however, use these concepts in a rather uncritical way. Dewaele, for instance, complains that much previous research ignored whether ''bilinguals were in fact trilinguals, quadrilinguals or pentalinguals'', and adds that there is a need in future research for ''finer distinctions and categorizations'' (106). But he does not seem to be aware that these ''finer ... categorizations'' are themselves in need of being problematized: what counts as a separate language; how do ''mixed codes'' (see Muysken's chapter) count, etc.? Rothweiler relies upon a similarly uncritical use of the concept of language when she talks about very young children's acquisition of German in their homes. She fails to make explicit which variety of German they are acquiring. Hence, the children's ''errors'' may not be indicative of Specific Language Impairment but could simply be errors of Standard German. Indeed, the underlying Chomskyan assumptions of her discussion (e.g. ''inborn language acquisition faculty'' and ''critical period'', 238) make one worry about the conclusions drawn, in particular as these diagnoses can have very serious consequences for the children concerned. The continuing dominance of such essentialist assumptions and ideologies in some academic work also makes me wonder whether we perhaps urgently need a Handbook (showing the importance of) taking a language ideological approach to multilingualism.
REFERENCES Horner, Kristine and Jean-Jacques Weber (forthcoming) The language situation in Luxembourg. _Current Issues in Language Planning_.
Kroskrity, Paul V. (2004) Language ideologies. In A. Duranti (ed.) _A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology_. Oxford: Blackwell. 496-517.
Weber, Jean-Jacques (forthcoming) Safetalk revisited, or: Language and ideology in Luxembourgish educational policy. _Language and Education_.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER Jean-Jacques Weber is Professor of English and Education at the University of Luxembourg. His main research area is the study of language and education in multilingual and multicultural contexts (such as Luxembourg). He has also published extensively on stylistics and discourse analysis.
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